​​Allegories to process. I am a Shaman, and, I am not a Shaman. I Go To Another World. I Bring Back What I Can. The work could be viewed as a marker on the border with an inner world. It’s a quasi-religious situation which requires this second body of work allowing for verbal figuration, for narrative, to act as a signpost or guide. But most importantly to protect the main body of the work from the written and the spoken. When I talk about Shamanism in relation to the work I mean as a parallel to artist as scientist or artist as explorer; it really is just a comparative term. It’s not a search for truth but it is a search. The paradox is that the work, the results are real things, facts that have come from a place not in the world. It’s a basic conceit. What is Painting about? But it possesses several problems, largely- Is figuration allowed? What about illusory space? Painting as window? Is flatness the goal? Am I dealing with abstraction? Figuration? Can I reference things outside of the painting itself? Narrative? And so on. It’s a tangled web and trying to allow all the issues to remain present and still make a cohesive work can be hugely testing. Most of the time the goal is to keep the marks genuine but there is often a narrative creep, a very human desire to find an explanation for what is happening. Experiments with splitting the work into distinct groups found there was always too much slippage. Perhaps this is an attempt to draw a line in my own patch of sand, to see what falls where and why. The Centre for Shamanic Research *for listening and visualising not reading and thinking*